February 23, 2005
Stelarc
The Body as Host For a Remote Agent
From The Body by Stelarc, Switch Journal #19, 2005:
Movatar: When I started experimenting with involuntary body movements we quickly realized as well as the Body being locally controlled it might be possible with a touch screen interface to control the Body remotely. In fact we did a performance at Telepolis. We constructed a touch screen interface that allowed people in Paris, Helsinki and Amsterdam to access my body in Luxembourg and by touching the muscles on the computer model you could effectively program the choreography of the remote body in Luxembourg. You could do this either by pressing the touch screen or by pasting together from a wide array of gesture icons and then press Play and the physical body would respond in Luxembourg.
I could see the face of the person who was moving me, they could see my evolving body movements or their choreography. The body then became a kind of host for a remote agent. The idea that you could access part of my body from another place and physically actuate it. And in this performance those people in the three cities were able to access and move the Body over a period of three days.
Ping Body: We also used the ping internet protocol in a performance where the Body was moving through internet data. During the performance I would ping 40 global sites. The reverberating signals were measured in miliseconds mapped to the body muscles in a very crude way, but what was effectively happening was that the body was becoming a barometer of internet activity. The moved according to the internet activity from that global site.
Read The Body by Stelarc, Switch Journal #19, 2005
Posted by jo at February 23, 2005 02:52 PM
